Customer Reviews

1,001 Symbols: An Illustrated Guide to Imagery and Its Meaning

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The author investigates imagery in literature, religion and art, making the connection to universal themes in the human psyche. The book lists the idea, quality or state symbolised and then discusses all the major imagery used to represent it under the topic. Important symbols with multiple meanings therefore appear under various different topic headings, whilst related topics are sometimes grouped together.

The book provides an overview of the various imagery used by different cultures that stand for concepts like happiness, joy, wisdom, goodness, evil, truth justice, freedom and salvation amongst others. The author claims that traditional imagery as a whole represents a relatively small spectrum of emotions and ideas that were seen as the keystones of civilisation, in order to emphasize the positive over the negative. The book includes many cross-references, an index and plenty of striking monotone and full colour illustrations.

This is a neat book with interesting info about many symbols. This is good if you are curious and want to expand your knowledge but this is not a research resource. The book is very small and can be hard to keep open with one hand as it is very thick. Make it bigger and add more visual symbol samples (drawings, pics, etc.) and it would be perfect.

This is a gift, but I looked through it and it is interesting, and i'm quite picky with the "history" some people write.. This is not very detailed (it's a very small sized book), but what's in there is enough to peak interest, set someone on the right path to searching for more info.
Just what I hoped it would do:)

I thought this was going to be like an old chronicle book that my boss used to own, but it's not. The layout isn't very good. I don't use it as much as I thought I would.